I am listening to a reply of activity in the mission control room from the landing of the second Mars Rover, Opportunity, from last night. They polled various members of the team, and then someone announced that they were "Go for EDL" (EDL is atmospheric Entry, Descent, and Landing).

This made me wonder what, exactly, they would have done if they decided that they weren't "Go for EDL"? They were minutes away from receiving telemetry indications that the device was entering the Martian atmosphere. Of course, since there is about a 20 minute turn around time for signals to Mars, right now, it was far too late to send any command to the entry vehicle to abort. By the time such a signal arrived, the entry vehicle would probably be hanging on a parachute or resting on the Martian surface.

Yes. Perhaps they forgot that they has already separated from the cruse module. Or perhaps they planned to use some of the leftover coolant for reaction mass.

Seriously, though, I imagine it was just their way of reassuring the team that there were no problems that they needed to scramble to fix, before the encounter with the atmosphere. Still, the terminology was amusing.

I recently noticed you have added me to your friends list. I'm considering adding you back, but I'm fairly choosy about who I add, primarily because I don't want to wade through scads of posts on my 'friends' page to find the folks whos posts I want to read on a 'daily' (sort of) basis. So, don't be offended if I don't add you, but to help me make my decision... what spurred you to add me? :)

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I'm pretty sure I've seen you post in some of the other journals I read, but I don't see any of them in your "Friends" list. Have you trimmed your friends list lately?

Your journal is low volume, which suggests that you only post when you actually have something to say (What a concept! 8-]). And you seem to have interesting things to say.

The "Friends" list should really be called a "Reading" list, and I agree, it never makes sense for one to get uptight over anyone else's failure to add him. Only you can decide what you find interesting to read, and I certainly won't try to second guess your judgment on your own reading list.

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Ok cool.. I'll probably add ya anyway since my list isn't too massive, and you're a techie so you might come in handy once our company gets rolling ;) lol (I'm always on the lookout for good tech people!)

Yeah, I only tend to post when I feel inspired... or I read a good quiz to post or something. I don't like empty blather posts 'i got up early today... had some eggs and toast, went to work as usual.. blah blah blah'. But hey, these journals are for the person posting them more than anything else (supposedly heheh) so, whatever turns their crank. I just won't be adding them to MY list.

Hello, Adriang. I keep forgetting to read your posts - I like the ones about the Mars Rover.

You know, I did my thesis on Mars. It had a very ambitious title "The effects of surface loading in the Tharsis region." I was hoping to get MOLA tracks of the region and find a compressional bulge around the area, trace the trajectory of the bulge, and then count faults. In theory, it was supposed to give me an idea of the mass of the Tharsis bulge, and give some interesting insight into it's mechanics.

Well, the MOLA tracks from NASA are actually coded in this horrendously complicated (to a completely ameture programmer - I'd only taken one introduction class to scientific computing, and I can't even remember the language I learned) file, and it was taking me like, a month just to write the program to READ the files, so I couldn't get any images.

In the end, I was distracted from my ambitious work, and my thesis was a horrendous compiliation that summarized the works of other people dealing with the same idea, but no one had ever had the MOLA data, and that could have a looot of information.

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Well, the MOLA tracks from NASA are actually coded in this horrendously complicated (to a completely [amateur] programmer - I'd only taken one introduction class to scientific computing, and I can't even remember the language I learned) file, and it was taking me like, a month just to write the program to READ the files, so I couldn't get any images.

That must have been disappointing. I have the opposite problem, I suppose. I live and breathe programming, but I don't have nearly as much time as I would like to study the various sciences that interest me. My college years gave me a good start, but I have to admit that I've forgotten an awful lot of math (although I dare say I have both forgotten and still remember far more math than most people ever learn. 8-]) and a lot of the science that my degree program covered. I suppose I'm better prepared to learn it over again, but still, my work doesn't really offer much use for all that education, and that's a bit disappointing. Sometimes I wonder if I could use my programming skills as to pry my way back into more serious sciences. I'm sure it would mean accepting a substantial pay cut, but I think I might enjoy it more.